quirks

Many existing Joomla templates have the following statement as the first line of the index.php file:

This conforms to the W3 specifications and is interpreted correctly by browsers other than Internet Explorer (IE). Unfortunately, having this statement the head of the template's index.php file causes IE (including the current 6.0 version) to go into Quirks Mode. Read this to learn about Quirks Mode and IE.

To prevent IE from entering Quirks Mode, replace the and statements at the top of the template's index file with:

$iso = split( '=', _ISO );
$Browser_Type = strtok($HTTP_USER_AGENT, "/");
$doc_type = "";
if (ereg( "MSIE", $HTTP_USER_AGENT))
{
echo $doc_type;
echo '';
$browtype = "You are using IE";
}
else
{
echo '';
echo $doc_type;
$browtype = "You are not using IE";
}
?>

Hopefully the future IE 7 release will correct this and bring IE in line with the W3 specifications

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Instead of browser sniffing (x_x) couldn't you just insert the following in the segment?

Code:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

That's what Jeffrey Zeldman recommends in his book, "designing with web standards," page 158. See source code here: http://zeldman.com

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Hi! I am desperately searching for a cure for the rhuk solarflare ii template displaying weird in IE6 for Windows. I have modified the template and it looks fine in all my Mac-based browsers. The URL is http://www.anotherproject.se. I am, however, not savvy enough to understand how to alter the index file to make it work in all IE for Windows. Could someone with the expertise help me through this, by exemplifying it in the copied code below?

Code:
<?php
defined( '_VALID_MOS' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
// needed to seperate the ISO number from the language file constant _ISO
$iso = explode( '=', _ISO );
// xml prolog
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="'. $iso[1] .'"?' .'>';
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<?php mosShowHead(); ?>
<?php

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Change this statement..

echo ''
to...

// echo ''

This may help some, but think you may also have to change the width in some of the css statements in the template_css.css file too....

Think there are more threads here in forum regarding this issue with the solarflare ii template....try searching the forum for more on this issue...

Good luck...

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IE6. What I have learned is that I am using the scrolling news module in the "top" location. The width parameter was set just a hair too long and caused the whole template to bump over a location (just in IE6). The scrolling news module doesn't seem to scroll on IE6 or IE7 so I may just replace it all together. Other than that, my main menus are not displaying correctly (just in IE6) so I may have to adjust the height in the .CSS or something.

Rumor has it that there is another version of this solarflare template that is not a fixed width. Anyone have a pointer to that?
Thx.

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From what I've been reading, by changing the order of the !doctype and the XML prolog statement you can force IE6 into quirks mode ore not. See here:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html